Music Training: Brain Plasticity
Music and Neuroscience
“Music relates to many brain functions like perception, action, cognition, emotion, learning and memory and therefore music is an ideal tool to investigate how the human brain is working and how different brain functions interact.”
Music is a research area for neuroscientists – scientists who study nervous system – because of its relation to various brain functions mentioned above. I came across a very interesting video on YouTube on Music Processing. The video demonstrates the basic knowledge of the processing of music in the brain.
About Neuroplasticity and Means to Investigate
The brain develop much quickly at early childhood of a person’s life; however, the development of the brain does not stop at early childhood. The brain continues developing and being modified by experiences. To investigate and observe the changes within the brain, non-invasive scientific methods are developed, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Music and Plasticity
Both long-term and short-term music trainings have effects on brain plasticity. Experiments were done on musicians and non-musicians. Some interesting findings are:
- Musicians are generally better in recognition of tones, especially in instrumental tones (piano), than non-musicians. The longer the music training, the large the difference in representation between pure tones and piano tones.
- Musicians can much readily distinguish the timbre from their trained instruments than from an untrained instrument.
- When non-musicians were exposed to short-term music training, the ones that had practiced on piano performed better than the ones that only had auditory training.
- etc.
Those are wonderful things associated with music on the topic of neuroplasticity. Nonetheless, there is a “dark side” to it, because maladaptive reorganization in auditory nervous system can result tinnitus. This condition can severely affect people’s quality of life in a negative way. Through music training, the effects of tinnitus on subjects can be dramatically decreased.
“The effects of training on cortical plasticity involving music hold promising prospects for neuronal rehabilitation, as shown in the last tinnitus study”.
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Further Reading:
Pantev, Christo; Herholz, Sibylle C. Plasticity of the human auditory cortex related to musical training. Elsevier. Neuroscience & Biobehaviroral Review. November 2011.
October 21st, 2011 at 8:21 pm
It’s not really the same subject, and I’m potentially revealing my degree of nerdiness by the number of documentaries I refer to in my blog comments, but this post reminded me of an amazing Nova episode (link) I watched a few months ago. You can watch the full episode online.
October 21st, 2011 at 9:20 pm
I need to work on the transition… It is an interesting topic to write, but I was not presenting it in an effective manner. I think I will try re-write the blog some other time.
October 23rd, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I’ve often heard about “creative” talent (including music) controlled by the right half of the brain but I like how this article has a different focus on auditory ability particularly for music.
Also the part in the video that there are musical centers spread out all over the brain is interesting. It reminded me of a discussion with a friend from biopsychology I had just last week about the use of the brain and handedness. It seems like a lot of our beliefs on “this is controlled by the left (/right)
side of the brain” is actually “controlled by parts throughout the brain but relatively stronger on one side”.